Do You Have a Family?

On one of my first days in Dushanbe, a young man asked me, "Oyleh dareed?" [Do you have a family?] I answered, "Of course. My mother and father and two brothers are in America." "Na," he responded, "Shohar dareed?" [No - Do you have a husband?] This is one of the first questions that people ask here. There is only one word for family, but when you are old enough, "family" means "your own family with husband and children because you should be married by now and if not you should marry a nice Tajik boy."  For me, "family" means my relatives in America, and it also means my friends here, who are my Tajik family.

My family in Dushanbe was obvious from landing: myself and the three other ETAs arrived on the same flight and stuck together from then on. Embassy workers often commented on how we were always together. When we went to a talk with students in Qurghonteppa, one of them asked, "How long have you known each other?" We thought about it - we had been together in the country for a week at the time, but we met in Austin, TX, in June for four days - "Three months?" "I thought you had known each other since childhood," the students responded.

ETAs, our embassy contact person and one ELF get silly during a long photo-shoot evening.

Our mother - or Fairy Godmother, depending on the day - was the woman that Areebah and I stayed with for two weeks. Shafoat is a local embassy worker who let us sleep in her daughter's beds, lent me her clothes (and gave me some), cooked for us and taught us to make sambusas. Areebah and I stayed up late talking to her about Tajikistan and America, education and healthcare, college and her daughters: one sixteen and indecisive, one eighteen and now a Freshman at Goucher College in Baltimore. Shafoat was our host, our guide to the city, our friend, our mother, as well as host to the other ETAs and ELFs for frequent dinners, inviting over her other friends from the embassy and generally easing our transition into the country.

We put the "bright" in Fulbright.

Leaving Dushanbe was unexpectedly sad because I felt like I was leaving this family. Now in Khujand, I have a smaller family so far: Sarah, an ELF (English Language Fellow - her ears do not seem to be pointy). She arrived a week after the rest of us, but was just as much a part of our pack in Dushanbe. We were glad to find that we liked each other enough to propose: "Hey, I just met you, and this is crazy, but do you want to live together, maybe?" We both enjoy singing, and have become something of a traveling minstrel show. On our way to Khujand, we stopped at three English classes, and ended up singing "Leaving on a Jet Plane." After the first one, we brought the guitar in (we bought the guitar in Dushanbe). Our apartment is beautiful, and we are glad to have each other to talk about our impressions of our jobs and the places we go and the people we meet.

We took this picture to advertise how ready our home is for visitors - 

particularly for our family spread elsewhere South in the country, but also for others.